Disclaimer: Chris Carter and 1013 Productions own the X-Files, and I claim affiliation with neither one.
Spoilers/Time Frame: Mid-Scully abduction arc, post-Ascension.
Notes: By writing something I'm sure has been beaten to death as my entrance fic to the fandom, I've tried to put a little bit of a spin on it, and I'm hoping there's no confusion, though if there is, don't hesitate to say so. Has been edited since first posted, due to mistakes that were driving me completely nuts.
We come into this world, our only destiny to live and die, our only purpose to give some meaning to both acts. Upon succumbing to our deaths, we leave only our bodies behind to remain as evidence of our journey and trial. In inevitable eventuality, these to succumb to decay and rot. Life is fleeting, and eager to erase the last vestiges of it's own existence.
Her voice remains on his answering machine, a snapshot of a moment in time he has no right or will to erase. Even now, it paints a moment in thick swaths of panic and desperation, foretelling the sight of shattered glass on the floor and her blood on the doorframes as it had three months ago before he'd even arrived at the scene, belatedly, her screams already an echo in time from the now-distant moment that passed him by without his knowledge.
They have already imprinted themselves into his subconscious to ring through his nightmares, a lasting reminder of his utter failure in the light of the trust she had come to have in him since she had come to believe, a light that shone brighter than anything had since his sister had been taken – a light to which he had become too accustomed. Faced with the plunge into complete darkness again, unused to the way, he has stumbled and given up, immobility his only chance – or so he believed.
His self-inflicted immobility has brought neither his own preservation nor Scully's, who today has become nothing more than a badge and a few sheets of paper in a musty file cabinet in the depths of the FBI, unjustly relegated to a stash of cases like hers that are not opened, investigated, or cared about by anyone excepting himself. Both body and soul taken and unaccounted for with no evidence as to whether she lives or has since died, all physical evidence that remains as to her life's meaning and very existence are personal effects that, while having belonged to her, are not her.
Life is fleeting, and nothing remains.
This is something a pathologist must intimately understand, as we rush to learn the story of a life as told by its body,
The room is silent and empty, and it hangs heavily from his neck in the form of a small golden cross on a light chain. If only because it is himself who has given meaning to it, he refuses to add it to the file, to thereby drain it of its meaning through that very act of impersonalization until it becomes merely something a faceless name once wore. Since her abduction, it has become his touchstone, its beauty laying in its simplicity and strength, eloquently and silently describing her. The sunlight glints off the gold, and for that moment, Scully shines through. Shouts mangled by both desperation and bad tape quality recede in his mind, and for a moment he can hear her voice, gentle, almost as his conscience. For a moment, he can feel her with him so strongly that when he does not open his eyes to the brilliance of her blue eyes in front of his, it's all he can do to bury his face in his hands.
For a moment, it had been enough. It had been enough after Sam was taken, those brief moments of respite, of belief He wanted to believe in a God, when all he had to believe in were his memories and a hope that someday they would come to light and justice – that someday, he would see his sister again. There was no evidence, and no body. Even with the resources he now has at hand that he would have killed for as an eleven year old boy, he finds himself confronted with the same restrictions, the same inability to do something, anything. There is no evidence, there are no traces, there are no witnesses. There is no body. He turns the cross over in his fingers, watching the light play and dance across it, shining with the strength of Scully's beliefs. Against his own neck it looks out of place. Her beliefs had included God and himself, and he believes in neither.
as we steady our hands to not disrupt or destroy what evidence there is to tell us,
It has been twenty three years since his sister was taken. He doesn't think he can live twenty three years again, and he doesn't want to, when the strength of belief has come be and mean nothing.
Snapshots and imprints of her face, her voice, and her soul are all he has left, and he refuses to be the one to willfully erase them from existence, knowing that with them would go his last selfish connections to her, and his will and drive to search with as much urgency as her last words to him held. He owes her that much, not only for where he has failed her, but for the unspoken oath he has always believed their friendship holds.
and as we struggle not to allow the meaning the ones we examine invested in their lives to slip away,
Her voice remains on his machine, merely a representation of a snapshot in time, a moment in which he was not there, and failed her, both as her partner and her friend. Motionless and alone in the dark, he is the only witness. The room is still and empty, scarcely breathing as it listens again to her last testament, the too-loud reverberations which disrupt her shouts, shattering her voice and the still air as they shatter him. Her cross remains as a sign of her faith, his weakness and his strength, his unfailing belief that she will be found. She remains missing.
never to be grasped again.
She remains.